Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Grusome: locomotivA new track from one of the kings of the underground welly blip'n'bleep scene. Grusome manages to mix in a few of those nasty wahwohwhoaaahhhh d'n'b sounds into this one, as well. # |
Compare & ContrastPNN wouldn't be the first to point out the obvious similarities between the new TVNZ, and the slightly more content rich BBC websites (imitation is the sincerest form ... etc.), but he does also notice that the people behind AgendaTV might have looked at the Listener site more than once when designing their own site (although probably not quite as much as those behind the Capital Times site). You should see the site I'm working on now (well, you can't actually, until August, at least) - the design team behind it have obviously been 'drawing inspiration' from the my.msn.com site. Do all big local nz websites need to be so derivative of overseas efforts? Maybe not. The guys at CactusLab are flying the flag for stylish but simple homegrown sites with sophisticated back-end content-management systems (CMS), with some nice-looking content-rich sites for amplifier.co.nz (nz music mp3/video), the aforementioned Listener, and Public Address. I hear via the grapevine that they're also doing bands.co.nz new website. I wonder if they'd do a noizyland revamp pro bono?
For more classic examples of design 'inspiration', check out Pirated Sites. # |
OK/Cancel?Malach over at Scroll of Emptiness nails it on the head when he has a bit of whinge about poorly thought out dialogue boxes. I feel the same. As he points out...
"If a dialogue box asks me a question, I should be able to answer it in a conversationally correct manner. 'Would you like to continue this operation?' is a question that should be answered with 'yes' or 'no'. 'OK' is (borderline) acceptable as a replacement for 'Yes', but 'Cancel' isn't for 'No'." Word. I get caught out by this once in a while, especially when a dialogue box pops up asking me something like... "Are you sure you want to cancel this update?" OK | Cancel Now, I know this is a bit stupid, but my natural inclination is to hit 'cancel', because, after all, I'm cancelling whatever it is that I'm doing. But no, I really have to hit OK. Why not just, as Malach points out, make the options yes/no, and avoid any confusion? Grrrr. # | Monday, April 26, 2004
I have seen the future, and it is called ShuffleInteresting editorial piece by Leander Kahney over at Wired on the impact of the humble 'shuffle' option has had on the way people use music-listening devices (such as the iPod), which can hold many thousands of songs. He writes..."Stuffy old listening habits -- like listening to albums from beginning to end -- are being thrown out in favor of allowing machines to choose songs at random, which often leads to unexpected, and magical, juxtapositions of music." He reports one of his interviewees as saying, "I tend to listen to the iPod on random a great deal of the time.... With a large music collection, it is very easy to forget some of the gems that are in there, and random tends to bring some of those out again." This is actually something I've found myself doing more and more with my mp3 collection (listened to via humble old WinAmp), as a way of forcing myself to listen tunes off albums I rarely delve into (and as a way of not listening to the same Orbital album over and over again, as I am prone to do at work). Just out of interest, I discovered that, at present, at work, when I load my entire mp3 directory into winamp, I've got 1513 tunes I could potentially listen to. Timewise, that's about 5 or so days of solid listening to get through the whole lot. Considering I'm only at work 8 hours a day, and listen to music for about half of that time, I could go for about 6 weeks before hearing the same track twice. # | Thursday, April 22, 2004
I'm a loser baby'....I started the song by writing the verses, and attempting to rap like Chuck D [of Public Enemy]. When [Carl] played it back I thought, ‘Man, I’m the worst rapper in the world—I’m just a loser.’Beck, honest to the core. It was 10 years ago this week that his first major label release - Mellow Gold - came out, so various Beck-geeks are planning events around the world to celebrate, including the streaming of the entire album. If you want to know how to play Beck tunes, try here, and for the lyrics and insights into the writing of the songs (as per the one above), this site is a goldmine of information for your budding beckophile. [via MetaFilter] # | Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Franz Ferdinand edit the Guardian's G2 "When we were asked to edit G2, we were thrilled, but a bit surprised at the foolhardiness of a broadsheet allowing a daft pop group to take the reins. It reminded us of the Oz magazine trial and this discussion led us on to our first theme. The idea of an image on page three of G2 which would challenge readers' concepts of obscenity appealed to us."Franz Ferdinand are, according to Russell Brown, "a kind of Brit art-school Strokes." They were given the editorial reins of the Guardian's G2 for April 19, and were lucky enough to end up with an edition overflowing with good articles. Check out the pieces on blogging (featuring Salam Pax), the Stairway to Hell that many rock musicians climb (ie. drugs, drink, death), and the decline of mythology in modern UK music. # | Monday, April 19, 2004
Fast FilmThis is amazing: a 14-minute short film composed of more than 65,000 paper printouts of individual images from 400+ live-action films (including the Maltese Falcon, The Bandwagon, Videodrome, Psycho, North By Northwest, Godzilla, The General, Dr. Strangelove, Raiders of the Lost Ark, To Catch a Thief, Breathless and a variety of Sean Connery era James Bond performances). You can see it here if you're RealPlayer enabled (ad/spyware version available here) and can put up with the frustration of watching what is obviously a brilliantly made film in a small window on your screen. If you can't, keep an eye out at it at a film festival near you soon. [via Yankee Fog] # | Saturday, April 17, 2004
32 Buckle My Shoe Coincidentally enough, the second worst birthday of my life was exactly ten years ago (well, obviously the date isn't a coincidence, but the 10 year gap makes me wonder what I've got in store for my - perish the thought - 42nd birthday). Not that any of my birthdays have ever been particularly bad - I don't usually get all introspective and mopey, it was just that this birthday fell at a bad time, and, against type, I took the chance to do some self-indulgent sad-sacking while I had the chance. It's my birthday, as they say, and I'll cry if I want to.First up - we'd been burgled. At the start of the week, we got home from work, went through the usual routines, got the boys to bed, then settled into our evening past-times. I'd recently bought a new toy for my PC that allows me to plug all my instruments (all, um, two of them) straight into my soundcard and play along with my dodgy electronic compositions. What I really want to be able to do is to get some guest vocalists in to add a bit of the ol' human element to some of the tracks, so, to do a bit of experimenting with levels and mic placement and whatnot, I'd borrowed a flash mic off a mate to see what was required in the set-up. Of course, the mic was the thing that I noticed was missing first. Thinking the kids had just picked it up and put it somewhere odd, I had a bit of a hunt around, which is when I found the long-lost lense cap for my digital video camera. I went to re-unite cap with camera. No camera. And that isn't something the kids can get at easily. "Do you think we've been robbed?" I asked the wife. "You know," she said, "I was just thinking that." We poked around the house, and yes, indeed, the bedroom window had been levered open, and the thief had come in, grabbed a couple of digital cameras, the mic, and done a runner. Gutted. Still, it could have been much, much worse (one of the cameras, I have to laugh, was broken, and the thief nicked that instead of making off with a couple of much more expensive and actually working SLR cameras). All my rare CDs were untouched (well, yes, they're rare 'cos no-one else likes them, but still), my guitars, various bits of computer equipment, and the computers themselves. Although, if I was a thief, and I took a look at the 20+ cables plugged into the back of my PC, and the mad medusa-like nest they've become over the years, I too would be hesitant to start unplugging the buggers and risk spending the rest of the day untangling the ones I needed from the ones I didn't. So, yes. Burgled, for one. Second was various work woes I won't worry you with, which actually led me to flagging work entirely on my birthday, and knocking off at lunch so I could spend the day with the family. A birthday present to myself. Or, at least, that was the plan. Upon getting home, the wife and I somehow got into a row which ended up with me cleaning out the guttering, and emptying and cleaning the long-neglected fishpond. There I was, on top of the roof, an overcast sort of day, scraping out the fetid decomposing leaves from the guttering thinking 'some birthday'. (Actually, once it was done, and the fishpond, it all felt quite satisfying.) At the start of the day, I only got one present (more cause for moping) - some piece of design whizziness (see picture) from my wonderful Gran. I couldn't figure out what it was, and it had me stumped all day until she rang in the evening and explained. "And I thought you were clever!" she chortled. If you think you're clever, suggestions as to the mystery object in the comments box, please. (Hints: the top of each device screws off, the small rings around the middle of each body are made of rubber). But the real kicker was the financial situation. Not since university have I (and in this case, we) been this skint. It's a major drawback of a monthly salary. In the first week we pay the bills, do a big food shop, fill up the car, pay off the credit card, and then try to survive the next three weeks on whatever shrapnel is left over. This month was worse than usual, with an expensive trip away added into the 'budget', so, with my birthday falling just a few days before the big pay-day, there was barely a cent to spend on birthday cheer. I took the boys for a walk down to the supermarket to get supplies to tide us through the weekend. I had $30. We needed various basics, a couple of dinners, and ingredients for the cake I was going to bake (for myself, on my own birthday), so I was doing the maths in my head as we went around (quite tricky when you've got two pre-school boys charging around demanding lollipops and chocolate), so, when we got to the wine section (surely a bottle of wine on my birthday!) I realised I was about $2 short of being able to buy even the dodgiest bottle of nasty red. So I just nicked a good one. Baby buggies are great for that sort of thing. It also meant I had $2 to buy some (sugarless) lollipops (aka shutter-uppers) for the boys for the walk home. A good mate turned up mid-afternoon with a (how thoughtful) hand-made and painted box as a replacement for my tin that had been lost in the burglary. How thoughtful. A second present! And it even had some fresh contents! Brilliant. Maybe this wasn't really such a bad birthday really. She put the hard word on me to come out later that night to see a gig her boy was performing in, but I was still in a pseudo-grumpy mood, so made claims of 'no babysitter available' to avoid any commitment to going out and having a good time. This, naturally, came back to bite me in the bum when she later talked to one of my regular babysitters and discovered I hadn't even made the effort to give them a call. Busted. Anyway, we got the boys to bed after dinner (I cooked - special birthday lasagne with spinach from the garden, followed by my not-too-bad-slightly-dry-but-first-effort-and-all banana cake), then settled down for a night of vege TV-watching. The first half of the Blues v. Sharks was entertaining from the old Cantab-enjoying-the-Auks-going-down kinda way, but we then discovered a Spike Lee film ('Jungle Fever') on Rialto, watched that (5 out of 10 - Wesley Snipes just isn't a good romantic lead, is he?), and then the first half of the Coldplay live in concert thing, before hitting bed, a year older than I was when I went to bed yesterday. And, as with my terrible birthday 10 years ago, the very end of the day more than compensated for any moping and negativity I may have inflicted upon myself during the waking hours. By a long way. Oh-hoho, yes it did. # |
Coke is itMichael Green has been missing his Mello Yello. He wrote to the local distributors (the Coca Cola guys), to find out why his favourite fizzy drink had been pulled..."I was sucking back a Mountain Dew at work today and couldn't help but reflect on (a) why I had to walk two blocks to get it, and (b) where exactly things went bad for Mello Yello." The reply from Coca Cola reveals that not all multinational corporations are a faceless, mirthless bunch of money-grubbers.
[via David Farrar] # | Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Radio Active 89FM NZ Music Show Playlistbroadcast: 2100-2300 NZST | TUE 6 April, 2003The La De Das - How Is The Air Up There? Chris Thompson - Hugo Spellman Cassette - Don't Let Anyone Ghostplane - State Hijack The Clean - Drawing To A (W)hole The Shrugs - Under Watercolour Prince Tui Teka - Beautiful Woman The Upbeats - Go Round Mc Tali - Blazin' Scribe Feat. Lady 6 - So Nice Sjd - Four Door Dimmer - I Believe You Are A Star Tama Waipara - Love And Sleep Cloudboy - Little Prince Video Kid - DJs Girlfriends The Brunettes - Polyester Meets Acetate Bic Runga - Roll Into One Jet Jaguar - Invercargill Phelps And Munroe - Ex Sports Star Turned Commentator Dead C - Speed Kills Crack Mono - Hate Deck Darcy Clay - Don't Want To Think About It Denver Mccarthy - Glistening # | Thursday, April 01, 2004
Canada: file-sharing not illegalIn another blow to the various music industry organisations attempting to stem the tide of file-sharing, a Canadian judge has ruled that the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) cannot force Internet service providers to identify digital music-swappers. Judge von Finckenstein said that "there is no compelling evidence that either downloading or sharing of digital music files is even illegal." Canada OKed the downloading of music via p2p networks last year, but while uploading remains illegal, the way that modern p2p systems work means that there is no actual uploading done by people sharing their music - it's just sitting there on your hard drive. Judge von Finckenstein, speaking about the users who the CRIA were trying to get hold of via the ISP records, said that..."...no evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings. They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service...I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user that places a personal copy on a shared directory linked to a P2P service...The mere fact of placing a copy where it can be found by another user does not amount to distribution." Obviously, this is really just a situation (like so many) where the law has yet to catch up with how modern technology works, and will no doubt be rectified in future legislation - I hope the relevant people in New Zealand are taking note, especially since I notice that the new copyright amendment currently headed towards parliament makes no mention of what happens when you sell the original copy from which you've made copies onto CDR, cassette and mp3. Are you still entitled to keep those? I suspect, as the law stands (and will stand even after the amendments are made) that this situation won't be covered by the law, in the same way the p2p situation wasn't adequately covered by Canadian law. Man, I wish I was a lawyer working for the music industry. I'd be losing cases all over the place, but imagine the billable 12 minute blocks I'd be putting in. # | |
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